Don’t faint, but the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence have joined forces behind a bill regulating the sale of firearms.

The unusual coalition won easy House approval last week to close a loophole in the 1993 Brady law that allowed Seung-Hui Cho to buy the handguns with which he killed 32 people at Virginia Tech – even though a judge had declared him mentally ill. The Senate is likely to follow suit, marking the first time since 1996 that Congress has strengthened gun-control laws.

The bill is sponsored by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat who has long sought to tighten gun-control laws, and two pro-gun rights lawmakers, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.

The NRA is the nation’s largest gun-rights group. But its support for the new bill actually reflects the NRA’s long-standing belief that existing gun laws should be enforced before new ones are written. That’s exactly what the McCarthy/ Smith/Dingell bill would do.

The Brady gun-control law required states to submit information to a national database about people who are banned from buying firearms under federal law – including convicted felons, those involuntarily committed to mental health facilities, and those whom courts have deemed “a mental defective,” meaning they are a danger to themselves or to others.

But as a report ordered by President Bush after the April Virginia Tech shootings pointed out last week, that law has been poorly enforced because schools, doctors and police were unsure about what information could legally be shared because of the confusing and overlapping maze of privacy laws.

The bill passed by the House clarifies those rules and would provide grants for states to update the national database gun dealers use for background checks on prospective buyers. The update would add more criminal records and mental health information to the database.

At the NRA’s insistence, the bill provides a right of appeal to those who believe they are unfairly included in the database, which is maintained by the FBI.

We congratulate all sides of the often rancorous gun-control debate for coming together behind this sensible reform.

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